The moon base has a hardware plan. It needs a software strategy, too.

Early in my career at SpaceX, I was the only person dedicated to training the mission control team for Dragon. For three years, I built the training for the operations team. The documentation came second, always the thing I'd get to later, always the thing that felt like overhead against the actual work of getting the mission ready.

Then we needed to scale. What followed were months of reconstructing decisions that should have been in the record from day one: how certain anomalies worked, different places we could start and stop the mission, hundreds of little choices that could affect how training was executed, communicated and debriefed. The operational debt accumulated by deferring that work was more expensive than any hardware redesign.

NASA's moon return plans announcement this week has me thinking about that lesson. Specifically, how it will affect the new era of human space exploration as space boots meet space ground once again.